Hello everyone! This is an area online where you can access links to my favorite sites, work to complete some of your in-class assignments, and find out what you missed if you were absent.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Hunger Games Technology (cont.)

During our last class, we took a survey about our technology usage and had a pretty lively discussion afterwards. We found some quotes from the latest read which related to the abuse of technology by the capitol, and along the way we got to talk a lot about some other ways that technology is represented in the book. You all gave 100%, and I can't thank you enough! Mrs. Miles (who was visiting our class) was also very impressed with your ideas and your enthusiasm for the book. Great job!

So today we are going to continue talking about technology, only now we are bringing in some bigger real-world connections.

We've had a little bit of discussion about the revolution in Egypt, and you might have recently heard that the revolution was successful in ending the 30-year reign of the country's president, Hosni Mubarak. To get a better picture of the unraveling of the revolution (specifically the way technology factored into the uprising) we're going to do some guided summaries! (otherwise known as GISTs, I guess!)

This is the first GIST I'm going to see in action, so bear with me for just a bit during class.

Basically, the goal is to find 8 important words in these articles that are the most important. Through group work and discussion, we will pare it down to five total words, and with that list of five words we will write a short summary of the entire article, incorporating those words in the summary. My hope is that we can finish in time to discuss these current events and connect them to the reading we will do at the end of class.

Until then, here is a map of the districts of Panem, the setting for our book. You'll each get a copy in class so we can follow along as we read.